BRADNER: Opponents of city-county merger look to make future one tougher

INDIANAPOLIS - The tremendous failure of a proposal to merge the governments of Evansville and Vanderburgh County in last November's referendum stuck a fork in that idea at least for now.

On the heels of that victory, opponents of a city-county merger are now trying to make it much harder for one to take place at any point in the future.

They are pushing Senate Bill 343, which would require a "rejection threshold" for any such merger efforts. It's a tricky phrase, but in practice, it would hand far more power to voters who live in the county but not the city and therefore would make mergers far less likely.

Here's what "rejection threshold" means:

Last year, Vanderburgh County held a single, countywide vote. Those who lived inside Evansville's city limits had just as much voting power as those who lived outside the city, and whatever the county's full set of voters decided would go.

With a "rejection threshold," there would instead be two votes. Any proposed merger would have to win the approval, separately, of the city's voters and the county's voters.

Advocates say it's an important protection for county voters who do not wish to take part in "forced annexation." Those voters are much more likely to reject such a merger, because their tax rates would be most likely to increase.

"The plan was put together with only one side's views being taken into consideration, and the other entity being essentially ignored," said Bruce Ungethiem, the co-chair of CORE, a group that campaigned against the merger.

The chief opponent of the measure is the Indiana Chamber of Commerce, which argues that city-county mergers would become "Mission Impossible" if it becomes law.

The Indiana Association of Cities and Towns opposes the bill, as well. That group's argument is that county residents tend to benefit from nearby city services, such as libraries, parks and more, without shouldering any of the tax burden to fund those perks.

The bill has already passed the state Senate on a 46-3 vote, and it won the unanimous 12-0 approval last week of the Indiana House Government and Regulatory Reform Committee. It now heads to the full House for a vote, and then would go to a joint House-Senate conference committee to have some differences in the versions that each chamber approved ironed out.

The issue is drawing attention in municipalities across the state. Residents of the town of Fishers, a suburb north of Indianapolis, for example, have rejected efforts to annex a nearby township and turn the town into a city.

But there's no doubt most of the interest in the bill is coming from Vanderburgh County.

"I think I've gotten emails from just about everybody in Vanderburgh County maybe twice," said the half-joking House committee's chairman, Rep. Kevin Mahan, R-Hartford City.

With 67 percent of Vanderburgh County's residents voting against a city-county merger in November 2012, the area is unlikely to see another serious pursuit of such a merger any time soon. Lawmakers, though, could make that task even more daunting than last fall's election returns suggest.